Chip Griffin: Pardon the Disruption

C-SPAN to Podcast

PaidContent.org reports:

C-SPAN is launching its podcasts with three popular shows: After Words, Q & A and segments from American Perspectives.

Guessing the Demographics of Bloggers

MediaPost reports:

BUZZ-TRACKING FIRM UMBRIA WILL UPGRADE its Buzz Report, which tracks conversations about brands on blogs and message boards, by offering users more refined demographic information and an enhanced method for dealing with blog spam. Buzz Report, which monitors about 11 million blogs and 100,000 public message boards, already analyzes posts to determine writers' genders and ages. The new release will also measure such factors as geographic location, ethnicity, and income level.

Does Blocking Negative Domain Names Make Sense?

MediaPost observes a growing trend for campaigns on the web:

Democratic political consultant Michael Bassik adds that many political campaigns are purchasing variations of their candidates' names. "It's common for campaigns to not only purchase up every permutation of their own campaign's name, but also negative URLs as well," said Democratic political consultant Michael Bassik. "That's exactly what George Bush did in 2004. He not only purchased his own positive names, but names that could be used against him."

The problem with this strategy is that it is impossible to come up with every negative domain name an opponent could use.  Perhaps you can protect against lame ones like "BushSucks," but what about "ClintonLies" -- where does it end?  Despite Bush's efforts, for example, About.com has a whole section of Anti-Bush sites.

WashPost Creates Supreme Court Blog

The Washington Post has started a blog dedicated to the campaign to confirm Judge Roberts to the Supreme Court to replace Sandra Day O'Connor.

The Online Ad War Begins

Beltway Blogroll offers a good look at the current state of online advocacy ads.

Sticking with Firefox: It's All in the Tabs

I tried.  I really, really wanted to go back to Microsoft Internet Explorer.  Overall, I prefer that browser to Firefox, mostly because the extensions they have and that many web sites take advantage of. 

But I couldn't do it.  The MSN search toolbar had me feeling good for a while because it enables tabbed browsing.  Unfortunately, it's not quite as good as the tabs in Firefox.  My biggest issue is that when you open links that call for a new window, Firefox opens a new tab.  IE opens a new browser.  Since I open a lot of links from within Microsoft Outlook, that clutters my desktop in a hurry.

Oh, well.  Hopefully IE7 will have better tab features.

E-mailers Want Sunset from FTC

New Media Marketer: E-mail marketers are lobbying the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to add a sunset provision to the CAN-SPAM Act that would allow e-mail addresses to be automatically removed from suppression files after five years.

Blogs, Texas Style

Kari Chisholm offers this: "Governing Magazine has a great discussion of the role that blogs are playing during the Texas legislative session"

How to Monitor Blogs

Idil Cakin of Burson Marstellar offers some good advice about dealing with the blogosphere in an article for DMNews.  Excerpted below are some of the more interesting points.  Whoever comes up with the best "secret sauce" to solve the problem of weighting blogs will have a powerful offering.  (This is something the brains at CustomScoop are actively working on.)

Keep your hand on the pulse: Partner with online research firms that mine and analyze user-generated media to determine if and how bloggers are buzzing about issues related to your business.

Map your blogosphere: Survey your audience and identify those who actively write and/or read blogs.

Weight your target blogs: Develop quantitative and qualitative metrics to rank the most influential bloggers for your industry. When determining a blog’s influence, evaluate the types of links on the blog, frequency of content updates and the credibility of the blog author. Track key stakeholders’ awareness and reactions to the blogger’s entries.

(Hat tip to Steve Rubel.)

MSN Desktop Search

This weekend I started playing around with the MSN Search Toolbar that also includes Desktop Search.  The Desktop app is very impressive and certainly handy.  It searches emails, including attachments, as well as documents on your hard drive for any search terms you input.

It's lightning fast and effective.  The search within Outlook feature has always been slow and clunky -- this delivers blazing speed that will make me use it more often.  Most of the time with Outlook I found it faster to manually browse through old emails, guessing when the one I was looking for had been sent/received.  Now I'll just type it in to Desktop Search and get my answer in less than a second.

I haven't used the rest of the Toolbar yet to know if I'll be switching back to IE from Firefox, but early returns are promising.  The tabbed browsing still isn't as clean as Firefox, but it may be enough to get me to leap back.  I'll let you know in a few days.

Technorati Taken to Task for Monitoring Service

This one I just don't understand.  Tom Foremski  takes Technorati to task over at Silicon Valley Watcher for a pay service that allows corporations to track their coverage in the blogosphere.  He writes: "I was surprised by how aggressive Technorati was in its pitch because it has a very good standing within the blogging community, a community that bristles at the thought of others commercializing its work."

Huh?  How would Technorati survive if it didn't monetize its investment somehow?  Whether it's advertising on a free site or subscriber fees on a pay site, they have to generate income somehow (that was the lesson of the Internet Bubble, after all).

It's all the more perplexing because Foremski seems to like Technorati, just not this service. 

(Usual disclosure: I am a co-founder of CustomScoop, a service that tracks blogs, among other things -- for pay at that.)

Internet Archives and Copyright

PaidContent draws attention to a potential sleeper issue for Internet content providers, aggregators, and readers: how far can caching go?  The post involves a lawsuit against the Internet Archive (a tremendous service that let's you look back at what a web site looked like years ago).

On Vigilante Journalism

Steve Rubel labels the latest activity of "swarms of citizen journalists ... mobilizing to settle scores" as "vigilante journalism."  It's an apt name for the phenomenon and it will be interesting to see how the debate moves on this.

Frankly, I'm torn.  Bloggers certainly have the write to "kvetch" (as BL Ochman woud say), but should they get any better treament because they have a bigger megaphone?  Coming from the world of politics, I know it already happens, so I tend to believe in the "all's fair" approach (as long as it is legal and ethical).  At the same time, bloggers can sometimes be like sports talk radio callers -- angry and impatient. 
So I guess I come down on the side of saying that it's fine to gripe on your blog -- and get better treatment as a result -- just so long as you make sure your gripe is legit and you've taken reasonable steps to resolve the problem without resorting to public attacks.

(As an aside, Steve mentioned the Jeff Jarvis vs. Dell thread that many are already aware of.  Using the CustomScoop trend tracking tool, I noticed that the issue continues to get a trickle of mentions on an almost daily basis -- not great news for Dell.)

Washington Post Adds Ads to RSS

AdAge reports on that the Washington Post has become an early adopter of RSS ads.  I've seen them in the feeds I subscribe to from the Post and they are done well -- easily seen but not obnoxious.

Does Size Matter?

Robert Scoble thinks so.  He argues that Bloglines beats out Technorati because it has more links. 

Now, Bloglines may indeed be better than Technorati -- I simply haven't examined it carefully enough to comment.  But you can't focus solely on quantity at the expense of quality.  All the links in the world don't matter if they're riddled with dupes and junk.  And what if one company delivers links much faster than the other?  Depending on your need, timeliness may outweigh comprehensiveness.

It's fine to debate which service is better, but I'd urge a more thorough comparison than a simple "mine is bigger than yours" argument.

Word of Mouth Marketing Conference Wrap

Cymfony offers a good recap of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association held this week in Chicago.

On a separate note, P&G refers to it as Word of Mouth Advocacy -- a term I think is more accurate and better explains the phenomenon when executed correctly.

Tracking "Podcast" vs. "Blogcast"

Robert Scoble likes Bloglines Citations for its ability to track blog conversations.  He points to the recent item about Microsoft preferring the term "blogcast" over "podcast."  He's right ... that's a good service.

But more to the point, it will be interesting to see whether the blogcast term catches on.  Obviously, right now it's being smoked by podcast still.  But we'll see what happens in coming days.  In addition to Citations, the CustomScoop trend service will help keep an eye on it.

FEC Hears Bloggers' Bid to Share Media Exemption

The Washington Post covers the ongoing saga between bloggers and the FEC.

Online News Clipper Adds Monthly Clip Cap

Readers will remember that one of the companies I am involved with is CustomScoop, an online media monitoring service.  Our industry has typically been based on an "all you can eat" mentality, where there are no per clip fees or limits.  This can be explained by the original impetus for many of our services: a rebellion against the slowness of traditional paper clippers and their often astronomical per-clip fees.

Interestingly, however, CyberAlert today announced a special package deal that includes a cap on the number of clips included in the base price. 

In the special 2 for 1 deal, you receive TV news monitoring for free. You receive both the online news monitoring service and the TV news monitoring service for the price of online news monitoring alone.

You pay only $195 per month for both services for the first 12 months. There are no per clip fees for up to 1,000 clips per month.

In examining their full price list, I noticed that they have quietly put in a limit for most of their account offerings.  It will be interesting to see how the marketplace responds to such limitations.

Changes Coming to Email List Marketplace

Changes are coming to the bulk email market, according to DMNews, and it's a mixed bag for advocacy email. The cost could be coming down, but the flexibility and effectiveness could be declining as well.

E-mail list pricing could drop as much as 25 percent in the next three to six months because of changes in the way service providers handle HTML e-mails.

The post notes that the next version of Outlook will block HTML graphics by default.

Congress Flooded with Email

An interesting article in the Washington Post identifies a growing issue for the interesection of technology and advocacy: email overload in Congress.

If you think you're swamped by Internet spam, pity the poor Congress.

According to a new study, electronic messages to the House of Representatives doubled to 99 million from 2000 to 2004. In the Senate, the number of e-mails more than tripled to 83 million during the same period.

The article goes on to discuss the interest by many outside companies in improving the delivery and impact of email.

Trend Tracking in Online Media

Over at one of the companies I'm involved with, CustomScoop, we've been playing with a new tool that we've only soft-launched and are getting feedback on.  I thought I'd share it with readers of InterAdvocacy to see what you think.

Basically, it's a free service that let's visitors see how two search terms do in head-to-head competition in the online media (including newspapers, mags, blogs and more).  Obviously, it serves as a teaser for the full CustomScoop service, but it also generates interesting results in its own right -- not unlike Intelliseek's Blogpulse Trends, except that we have a more balanced mix of coverage where they are exclusively blogs.

Some interesting ones I've tried myself: Robert Scoble vs. Steve Rubel, Bill Gates vs. Warren Buffett, and Hillary Clinton vs. John McCain.

The service is still a little slow sometimes since it's in the testing stages and hasn't been fully tuned, but please let me know what you think.